power of the middle-classes, but the work-country from evolution, by creating the
ing millions had no place in the social system except to labour and get drunk, to be imprisoned, and to die. Industry had arisen as the twin Moloch of Agriculture, and the lives of the: lower strata" were freely sacrificed upon both altars. Agriculture demanded that bread should be over a shilling a loaf, in order that the landlords should keep' up country palaces and town mansions; industrialism insisted that little children should work forty-eight hours a week for a shilling., In the}coalpits, children, of six were' employed for twelve hours a day. ° Until 1841 it, was legal to employ the unregarded wretches in place of brooms in sweeping chimnies. Actual grinding hunger was the ordinary lot of a vast proportion of the ivorkinz, classes of England sixty years ago. They kennelled in slums unfit for the stalling of beasts; they knew scarcely more, indeed, than the beasts. Benjamin Disraeli wrote, in 1837, of the inhabitants of a mining village in the Staffordshire Black Coun-tay,""—"I-am horrified to find grown-up men who are ignorant not only of the name
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.